4321
Paul Auster, 2017
Henry Holt & Company
800 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627794466
Summary
Paul Auster’s greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel—a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself: a masterpiece.
Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born.
From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives.
Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other.
Meanwhile, readers will take in each Ferguson’s pleasures and ache from each Ferguson’s pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson’s life rushes on.
As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 3, 1947
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American writer and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning. Those modes can be found in The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and most recently 4321 (2017). Auster's books have been translated into more than forty languages.
Early life
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-class parents of Polish descent: Queenie (nee Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He grew up in Newark and South Orange and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, all in New Jersey.
Career
After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris where he earned a living translating French literature. After returning to the U.S. in 1974, he began to publish poems, essays, and eventually novels of his own, as well as continuing to translate French writers, such as Stephane Mallarme and Joseph Joubert.
Following his well regarded debut, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude (1982), Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). Instead of conventional detective stories organized around a mystery, Auster takes on existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature. In the process, he creates his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernism) form. Comparing the two works, Auster said,
I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, [Manhattan] Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude.
The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance, 1990) or increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (Moon Palace, 1989; The Book of Illusions, 2002).
Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. His more recent works—Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), the novella Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), and 4321 (2017)—have been met with critical acclaim.
Work with PEN
In addition to being a PEN-Faulkner winner, Auster served on the PEN American Center Board of Trustees, from 2004-2009, and as Vice President from 2005-2007.
In a 2012 interview, Auster announced his refusal to visit Turkey in protest over the country's treatment of journalists. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan retorted: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?" Auster then pointed out that...
According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragip Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world.
Reception
In a 2003 Washington Post article, Michael Dirda, French critical theorist, praised Auster's "limpid, confessional style," and his penchant for placing his heroes in a world of...
...mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots...keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.
In a 2008 issue of The New York Review of Books, Dirda wrote that Auster had "established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature."
James Wood of The New Yorker, has been less effusive in his praise for Auster. In a 2009 issue of the magazine, Wood wrote:
Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves.... Because nothing is persuasively assembled...one [is left] largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.)
Cultural historian Morris Berman believes that while Americans concern themselves with Auster's literary qualities, Europeans find his view of American society far more stirring:
[T]he theme of Paul Auster’s novels is that American society is incoherent, that it lacks a true identity.... [B]y and large Americans don’t...don’t read him. [But] Auster is tremendously popular in Europe, he’s been translated into more than twenty languages: those are the bulk of his sales. Americans are not interested in this kind of perception.
Personal life
Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They have one son together, Daniel Auster. In 1981, he married writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), and the two live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.
Recognition
Auster has won more than 20 literary awards, prizes, and honors from the U.S. (8), Ireland (8), France (4), Spain (2), and Belgium (1). Included among them are film awards, his election to the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a fellowship, and an honorary doctorate. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/7/2017.)
Book Reviews
An epic bildungsroman.... Original and complex.... A monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.
Tom Perrotta - New York Times Book Review
A multitiered examination of the implications of fate...in which the structure of the book reminds us of its own conditionality.... A signifier of both possibility and its limitations.
Washington Post
At the heart of this novel is a provocative question: What would have happened if your life hadtaken a different turn at a critical moment?... Ingenious.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Auster presents four lovingly detailed portrayals ofthe intensity of youth – of awkwardness and frustration, but also of passion forbooks, films, sport, politics and sex.... [Trying] to think of comparisons [to the novel]...[nothing] is exactly right.... What he is driving at is not only the role of contingency and the unexpected, but the "what-ifs" that haunt us, the imaginary lives we hold in our minds that run parallel to our actual existence
Guardian (UK)
Draws the reader in fromthe very first sentence and does not let go until the very end.... An absorbing, detailed account – four accounts!—of growing up in the decades following World War II.... Auster’sprose is never less than arresting.... In addition to being a bildungsroman, 4321 is a “künstlerroman,” a portrait of the artist as a young man whose literary ambition is evident even in childhood.... I emerged from...this prodigious book eager for more.
San Francisco Chronicle
Leaves readers feeling they know every minute detail of [Ferguson’s] inner life, as if they were lifelong companions and daily confidants.... It’s like an epic game of MASH: Will Ferguson grow up in Montclair or Manhattan? Excel in baseball or basketball? Date girls or love boys too? Live or die?... A detailed landscape...for readers who like taking the scenic route.
Time
Auster pays tribute to what Rose Ferguson thinks of as a "dear, dirty, devouring New York, the capital of human faces, the horizontal Babel of human tongues."... Sprawling...occasionally splendid.
New Yorker
A stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read.... An incredibly moving, true journey.
NPR
Almost everything about Auster’s new novel is big. The sentences are long and sinuous; the paragraphs are huge, often running more than a page; and the book comes in at nearly 900 pages. In its telling, however, the book is far from epic, though it is satisfyingly rich in detail.
Publishers Weekly
Like life itself, fiction is full of endless possibilities, something the multi-award-winning Auster exploits to the fullest in his new work.... Archibald Isaac Ferguson['s]...life splinters off into four different yet parallel paths, with each path offering widely swinging variations.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Auster has been turning readers’ heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling.... He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date...[a] ravishing opus.
Booklist
Auster, as he often does, has something more complex in mind. Indeed, his subject in these pages is identity: not how it gets fixed but rather all the ways it can unfurl.... With this novel, Auster reminds us that not just life, but also narrative is always conditional, that it only appears inevitable after the fact
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for 4321...and then take off on your own:
1. Of the three (longer) lives of Archibald Ferguson—a journalist, a memoirist, a novelist—which do you prefer? Which engaged you more, which has a perferable outcome in your estimation?
2. To what degree, in terms of an irreducible identity, are the Archies similar? Are they sometimes too similar, making it hard to distinguish one life from another? Or do you find each Archid distinct from the other?
3. Archie's "sole ambition" is to "become the hero of his own life." Does he achieve this goal in any of his incarnations? What does that ambition say about someone?
4. Talk about the role of chance in Archie's lives. To what degree does accident, as opposed to fate or a sense of inevitablity, determine his various lives—and, by implication, our own lives. Consider, for instance, his belief that the 1969 draft lottery was "a blind draw of numbers that would determine "whether your were free or ot free." And that the "whole shape of your future life [was] to be scrlpted by the hands of General Pure Dumb Luck." Where else does chance come determine the shape of life.
5. Follow-up to Question 4: Consider, also, the Manhattan Archie who deliberately sabotages his own class standing in a desire to upend any plans that God might have for him. Where do you stand on the issue of self-determination, action, or God's will?
6. What about Amy Schneiderman and her varous incarnations? She and Archie have a romantic attachment in only one of the lives, and yet he pines for her in the others. What is Amy's powerful draw for Archie?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Black Water
Louise Doughty, 2016
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374114015
Summary
From the author of Apple Tree Yard comes a masterful thriller about espionage, love, and redemption. Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2016.
John Harper is in hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to the rain on the roof, he believes his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of what he’s already done.
In a nearby town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic history. They begin an affair, but can they offer each other redemption? Or do the ghosts of the past always catch up with us in the end?
Flashing back from late 1990s Indonesia to Cold War Europe, Harper’s childhood in civil rights-era California, and Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 and the subsequent military dictatorship, Black Water explores some of the darkest events of recent history through the story of one troubled man.
In this gripping follow-up to Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty writes with the intelligence, vivid characterization, and moral ambiguity that make her fiction resonate in the reader’s mind long after the final page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 4, 1963
• Where—Melton Mowbray (East Midlands), England, UK
• Education—Leeds University; M.A., University of East Anglia
• Currently—lives in London, England
Louise Doughty is the author of seven novels, including the recently published Apple Tree Yard, which is currently being translated into eleven languages.
Her first novel, Crazy Paving (1995), was shortlisted for four awards including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her sixth novel, Whatever You Love (2010) was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
She has also won awards for radio drama and short stories, along with publishing one work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year (2007), based on her hugely popular newspaper column. She is a critic and cultural commentator for UK and international newspapers and broadcasts regularly for the BBC. She was a judge for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and is currently Chair of Judges for this year’s Fiction Uncovered promotion.
Doughty was born in the East Midlands and grew up in Rutland, England’s smallest county, a rural area that later provided the setting for her third novel, Honey-Dew. She attended Leeds University and the University of East Anglia, where she did the MA in Creative Writing course with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. She then moved to London and spent the rest of her twenties in a series of temporary jobs including teaching and secretarial work.
It was her experiences as a temp secretary that provided the material for her Crazy Paving, a black comedy about accidents, Chaos Theory and urban terrorism. That was followed by Dance With Me (1996), a novel about ghosts, mental illness and sexual betrayal, and Honey-Dew (1998), a satire of the traditional English mystery.
Doughty took a dramatic departure with her fourth novel, the internationally acclaimed Fires in the Dark (2003), based on the history of the Romany people and her own family ancestry. It was followed by Stone Cradle (2006) and Whatever You Love (2010). In 2007, she published her first work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her newspaper column of the same name.
She has written major features, columns and cover articles for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Mail on Sunday, and her broadcasting career includes presenting radio series such as BBC R4's A Good Read and Writers’ Workshop. She is a regular guest on the radio arts programme Saturday Review. She lives in London. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Doughty’s excellent new novel is a character study, a glimpse at mid-century American civil rights, a thriller, a meditation on the effects of foreign policy on individuals, a modern love story and a portrait of Indonesian unrest in the 20th century.... If it sounds like a handful, it is. But Doughty has found an ideal vehicle for her wide-ranging interests.
Olen Steinhauer - New York Times Book Review
Doughty’s language is punchy, visually striking and emotionally potent.... This is a compelling and vivid psychological drama, with plenty of bite.
Leyla Sanai - Guardian (UK)
Skilfully drawn and compelling.... This serious novel marks a departure for Doughty, whose psychological thrillers, including Apple Tree Yard, have been so successful. This one strays more into le Carre territory—where she seems equally at home.
Carla McKay - Daily Mail (UK)
[T]he different elements never fully connect, the dense prose reading more like a newspaper investigation than fiction. Although tormented by his immoral choices, Harper elicits little sympathy from the reader, except during flashbacks to his childhood in L.A.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Doughty takes a page from John le Carre, crafting a riveting, psychological, morally ambiguous tale...richly detailed.... [T]he role of mercenaries in world affairs adds a new perspective to the spy novel genre.
Library Journal
Through Harper, Doughty creates a jarringly realistic backdrop of Indonesia’s violent past, sharply contrasting the menacing atmosphere with a growing romance and Harper’s memories of a vulnerable childhood in 1950s Los Angeles. A tense, contemplative literary thriller and worthy follow-up to Doughty’s critically acclaimed Apple Tree Yard (2013).
Booklist
Doughty has created a novel comparable to Graham Greene’s masterpiece The Quiet American in its taut exploration of morality on a geopolitical and personal scale.... The plot is complex and delves into dark, unjustly forgotten corners of history...as much a character study as it is an espionage thriller.... Black Water is a gripping thriller, incisive character study, a critique of US foreign policy and a love story haunted by the 1965 massacres in Indonesia.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review.) [A] morally and emotionally fraught thriller...about an operative for an Amsterdam-based black-ops organization grappling with fallout from his personal and professional history in Indonesia.... Powerful, probing fiction in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carré.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, consider our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Black Water...and then take off on your own:
1. What do you think of Nicolaas Den Herder, AKA John Harper? Why is he living in a hut in a remote corner of the world? In what way is he more than he appears? Is he a moral individual?
2. Talk about Harper as young Nocolaas. How did his beginnings, his birth in a prison camp and his upbringing, shape the man we meet in the novel? In what way does his childhood explain why Harper is the man he is—and why he leads the life he leads?
3. Follow-up to Questions 1 and 2: At one point, Rita asks, "John, what happened to you?" Why does she ask that question? Second, what did happen to Harper? How does Louise Doughty unravel life events that have cost John so dearly? And what, exactly, are those costs?
4. What about Rita? What do you make of her?
5. Talk about the dire poverty, in Indonesia. Consider the conversation Harper had with a colleague in 1965 regarding a bag of rice that would feed a single person for two weeks—it cost 1,000 rupiah. A schoolteacher, on the other hand, earned 500 rupiah a month. Harper responded, "when rice is that expensive, human beings are cheap." What are the implications of that observation, for the people of Indonesia or even, on a global scale, for nations, rich and poor?
6. Rita assures Harper that things are better in Indonesia. Can Harper convince himself that life has changed for the better? What do you think?
7. Follow-up to Question 5: How does the nexus of global politics and multinational corporations play out in this novel?
8. What, precisely, is Harper's role in Indonesia? People in his position are sent into countries to find answers to questions. What questions? And for whose benefit?
9. What kind of life does a spy lead? Consider friends and lovers, how people are viewed as assets and tools, the constant facade one hides behind, to say nothing of the presence of danger. What does that kind of life do to a soul? Or what kind of person chooses that profession?
10. Talk about Nicolaas's beloved Poppa, a man willing to put everything at risk to help those in need. How do we explain that kind of virtue in a world so fallen? Might the author be suggesting that, despite our lip service for doing good, Poppa is the one out of step in a fallen world, a world where people like Harper (and ourselves, perhaps?) are preoccupied with their own preservation?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Difficult Women
Roxane Gay, 2017
Grove/Atlantic
277 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802125392
Summary
A collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection.
The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail.
- A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage.
- A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other.
- A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer.
- A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind.
From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1974
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—Ph.D., Michigan Technicalogical University
• Currently—lives in Layfayette, Indiana, and Los Angeles, California
Roxane Gay is an American feminist writer, professor, editor and commentator. She is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, and co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective.
Early life and education
Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to a family of Haitian descent. She attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Gay holds a doctoral degree in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University. The title of her dissertation was, "Subverting the subject position: toward a new discourse about students as writers and engineering students as technical communicators."
Career
After completing her Ph.D., Gay began her academic teaching career in Fall 2010 at Eastern Illinois University, where she was assistant professor of English. While at EIU, in addition to her teaching duties she was a contributing editor for Bluestem magazine, and she also founded Tiny Hardcore Press. Gay worked at Eastern Illinois University until the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, taking a job in August 2014 at Purdue University as associate professor of creative writing.
Much of Gay's written work deals with the analysis and deconstruction of feminist and racial issues through the lens of her personal experiences with race, gender identity, and sexuality. She is the author of the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and Hunger (2017).
She also edited the book Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies. In addition to her regular contributions to Salon and the now defunct HTMLGiant, her writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, Bookforum, Time, Los Angeles Times, The Nation and New York Times Book Review.
In July 2016, Gay and poet Yona Harvey were announced as writers for Marvel Comics' World of Wakanda, a spin-off from the company's Black Panther title, making her the first black woman to be a lead writer for Marvel.
Reception
Gay's publication of the novel An Untamed State and essay collection Bad Feminist in the summer of 2014 led Time Magazine to declare, "Let this be the year of Roxane Gay." The magazine noted of her inclusive style: "Gay’s writing is simple and direct, but never cold or sterile. She directly confronts complex issues of identity and privilege, but it’s always accessible and insightful."
In the United Kingdom's The Guardian, critic Kira Cochrane offered a similar assessment:
While online discourse is often characterised by extreme, polarised opinions, her writing is distinct for being subtle and discursive, with an ability to see around corners, to recognise other points of view while carefully advancing her own. In print, on Twitter and in person, Gay has the voice of the friend you call first for advice, calm and sane as well as funny, someone who has seen a lot and takes no prisoners.
A group of feminist scholars and activists analyzed Gay's Bad Feminist for "Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism," an initiative of the feminist journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Personal
Gay began writing essays as a teenager; her work has been greatly influenced by a sexual assault she experienced at age 12. She is also a competitive Scrabble player in the U.S. Gay is bisexual. (From Wkipedia. Retrieved 2/2/2017 .)
Book Reviews
Gay has fun with these ladies. Her narrative games aren’t rulesy. She plays with structure and pacing.... She moves easily from first to third person, sometimes within a single story. She creates worlds that are firmly realist and worlds that are fantastically far-fetched.... With Difficult Women, you really have no idea what’s going to happen next.
New York Times Book Review
The real gift to readers in Difficult Women is [Gay’s] ability to marry her well-known intellectual concerns with good storytelling.... Gay excels in her allowance for human complexity.... One of the book’s greatest achievements is Gay’s psychological acuity in the creation of female characters who are teeming with dissonance and appealing self-awareness.... In a dark and modern way, this collection celebrates the post-traumatic enlightenment of women.
Washington Post
In these bittersweet lives, Gay finds fierce tenacity that bends but doesn’t always break.... Because Gay is such a vivid writer, her stories have a remarkable visual sweep. She puts her readers there.... Gay’s women are complicated, broken in places, and misdirected.... In Difficult Women, Gay gives these often-overlooked lives color and meaning. From a ramshackle Michigan trailer park to the affluence and ennui of a gated community in Florida—and myriad points in between—Gay writes of chances missed and unexpected joy, love gone awry or resurrected, and the slivers of hope that keep these fascinating women alive.
Boston Globe
The stories, phenomenally powerful and beautifully written, demonstrate the threats so many women in reality face, but also how, whatever their situation, they have agency, resilience and identities away from stereotypes created and reinforced by men.
Guardian (UK)
The characters who inhabit Difficult Women...aren’t just characters. They are our mothers, sisters and partners. They are human. They are us.... Gay manages to capture entire lifetimes, painstakingly sketching women, the underlying drives that give them their shape and the indignities that color the lenses through which they see the world.... These are real stories about real experiences and women seeking, deserving happy endings. They aren’t victims but survivors. Gay makes mosaics out of these women, seeing them as perfectly imperfect wholes in a world that routinely tries to break them down to pieces (4/4 stars).
USA Today
Gay’s signature dry wit and piercing psychological depth make every story mesmerizingly unusual and simply unforgettable.
Harper Bazaar
[A] powerful collection of short stories about difficult, troubled, headstrong, and unconventional women.... Whether focusing on assault survivors, single mothers, or women who drown their guilt in wine and bad boyfriends, Gay’s fantastic collection is challenging, quirky, and memorable.
Publishers Weekly
(Stared Review) Gay expands her writing prowess with this collection featuring colorful women protagonists.... Refreshing yet intricate.... This work will appeal to lovers of literary and feminist fiction.
Library Journal
Gay tells intimate, deep, wry tales of jaggedly dimensional women... Be they writer, scientist, or stripper, Gay’s women suffer grave abuses, mourn unfathomable losses, love hard, and work harder.
Booklist
A collection of stories unified in theme—the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves—but wide-ranging in conception and form.... Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women's lives and new ways to tell their stories.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Difficult Women...then take off on your own:
1. What is a difficult woman? How does Roxane Gay describe her...and how do you describe her? What makes a woman "difficult"?
2. Of the various women in her stories, which are your favorites and why? What makes them "difficult"?
3. Talk about the lives Gay's female characters lead, especially their jobs: maids, aerobic instructor, sex workers, engineer. What are those jobs like? Is it the positions/roles/jobs that make women difficult? What other types of jobs or roles would qualify?
4. What experiences have you had in which you might be deemed "difficult"?
5. In "Bone Density," one of the characters says, "We play games because we can and we like it." What kind of games does she refer to, and what does she mean when she says, "Most days these games keep us together, somehow"? Are women more adept at game-playing than men?
6. Talk about the unusual structure in some of Gay's stories, as well as point-of-view shifts, from first to third person. Others stories delve into surrealism, a glass wife, for instance. What, if anything, do those anomalies contribute to the stories? Or perhaps they detract from your reading experience.
7. Brutal things happen to babies in these stories: they're stillborn, abandoned, maimed in a parking lot. Notice, also, the way Gay links violence with sex—which is a long-held literary trope. Want to take a stab at the meaning or significance of all this?
9. Do any of the characters or events in the stories shock you...appall you...or anger you?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Books for Living
Will Schwalbe, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385353540
Summary
From the author of the beloved New York Times best-selling The End of Your Life Book Club, an inspiring and magical exploration of the power of books to shape our lives in an era of constant connectivity.
Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality?
For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life.
In this delightful celebration of reading, Schwalbe invites us along on his quest for books that speak to the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions. In each chapter, he discusses a particular book—what brought him to it (or vice versa), the people in his life he associates with it, and how it became a part of his understanding of himself in the world.
These books span centuries and genres (from classic works of adult and children’s literature to contemporary thrillers and even cookbooks), and each one relates to the questions and concerns we all share. Throughout, Schwalbe focuses on the way certain books can help us honor those we’ve loved and lost, and also figure out how to live each day more fully.
Rich with stories and recommendations, Books for Living is a treasure for everyone who loves books and loves to hear the answer to the question: "What are you reading?" (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Will Schwalbe has worked in publishing (most recently as senior vice president and editor in chief of Hyperion Books); digital media, as the founder and CEO of Cookstr.com; and as a journalist, writing for various publications including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. He is on the boards of Yale University Press and the Kingsborough Community College Foundation. He is the coauthor, with David Shipley, of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[I]nspiring and charming—a bit fusty at times, but endearingly so…My favorite of Schwalbe's essays are the ones that praise underappreciated values, those sometimes incorrectly categorized as vices. There's an ode to loafing and lounging…a piece on how it's O.K. to blow off your friends and stay at home…. And…a lovely paean to the joys of quitting, as illustrated by the greatest quitter of all time, Herman Melville's Bartleby…Books, to Schwalbe, are our last great hope to keep us from spiraling into the abyss. It's an old-fashioned thesis—that this ancient medium can save civilization—but I happen to agree. Books build compassion, they inspire reform. They remain, Schwalbe writes, "one of the strongest bulwarks we have against tyranny."
A.J. Jacobs - New York Times Book Review
Instead of trying to dust off some forgotten tome and convince us of its value, [Schwalbe] focuses on its pressing relevance at some critical juncture in his life. He isn’t arguing — and certainly not shilling — on behalf of a book or author; he’s passing on his own experience and leaving us to identify with it or not. Of course we do identify with it, typically, in large part because Schwalbe presents himself so convincingly as an Everyman. He doesn’t pretend, or even aspire, to the scholarly expertise of Denby and Dirda, or to Gottlieb’s breezy insider status. He conveys this humility with his easygoing, egalitarian tone and his high-low eclecticism, which ranges from Homer’s The Odyssey and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener to E.B. White’s Stuart Little and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train….Books for Living is [a] gift, and one that keeps giving.
USA Today
Moving….Schwalbe truly shines.…Pleasant….It should convince even reluctant readers to pick up a book.
Boston Globe
First-rate….Schwalbe’s enthusiasm for what he covers is contagious. He suggests enough fascinating books to keep you reading well through 2017.
San Francisco Chronicle
(Starred review.) Schwalbe’s tremendous experience with reading and his stellar taste make for a fine guide to the varied and idiosyncratic list of books for which he advocates. By the end of the book, all serious readers will have added some titles to their to-read lists.
Publishers Weekly
Schwalbe's...latest effort, bearing an equally misleading and presumptuous title, is a collection of essays on his emotional and psychological attachment to specific books. Unfortunately, this attachment is not always elaborated…. Verdict: For readers who prefer their tea lukewarm. —Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [F]inely crafted, generously candid, and affecting…. In this warmly engaging, enlightening, and stirring memoir-in-books and literary celebration, Schwalbe reminds us that reading "isn’t just a strike against narrowness, mind control, and domination; it’s one of the world’s greatest joys...."
Booklist
Schwalbe doesn’t go into that much detail about each book; rather, he leads by example, focusing on a book…in the context of something…that happened to him. In an age when the number of readers is declining, a delightful book like this might just snare a few new recruits.
Kirkus Reviews
In many ways, Books for Living is less an account of the specific books he cherishes than it is a gentle nudge to encourage readers to recall or seek out the kinds of books that will provide them with the meaning, solace and enlightenment he's gleaned from his cherished picks…. Anyone who shares his passion for books will have it sparked by his enthusiasm and unadulterated joy at these encounters with the written word.
Bookreporter
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the significance of the George R. R. Martin epigraph that opens Books for Living. How does it set the tone for the book?
2. In the introduction to the book, Schwalbe discusses the Internet’s limitations in helping to answer the big questions: "the problem of pain, meaning, purpose, happiness." How does Schwalbe’s discussion of modern-day living and technology act as a structuring element throughout Books for Living? Discuss the message of "slowing down" and savoring the printed word (and life itself) that Schwalbe champions. Did this message resonate with you?
3. On page 7, Schwalbe points out how reading has a tremendous influence on a person’s worldview and how "every book changes your life." Do you agree with this assertion? What books have quietly changed your life? Which books immediately announced themselves as significant to you? How do books that you’ve found to be less-than-enjoyable end up shaping you?
4. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living is a seminal text for the author and is mentioned frequently throughout the book. Discuss Yutang’s "radical rejection of the philosophy of ambition." How does the concept of idleness run contrary to the American value system? After reading this chapter, were you inspired to change any of your habits?
5. In "Searching," Schwalbe discusses his appreciation for Stuart Little after rereading it as an adult. Have you ever returned to a book from your childhood or adolescence? If so, how did your feelings toward the book evolve? Did it gain new meaning for you?
6. Discuss the idea of trust in relation to a book’s narration, per Schwalbe’s discussion of The Girl on the Train. What books have twisted your expectations because of narrative voice or voices? How does the idea of the "unreliable narrator" reflect greater truths about the subjectivity of human experience?
7. In "Connecting," Schwalbe discusses how Miss Locke, his high school librarian, helped to shape his identity by introducing him to James Baldwin and other masters of literature. Who in your life opened the door for you to discover influential writers and works? Have you ever been able to thank this person for doing that?
8. On page 83, Schwalbe discusses the feeling of tremendous sadness that came over him after finishing David Copperfield as a teen, "mostly because I was going to miss these characters so much." Which books have elicited a reaction of sadness after its conclusion? What characters have jumped off the page for you, become intimately familiar? Does the act of rereading these books provide comfort to you?
9. The idea of reading as a way to combat grief is a seminal theme in Books for Living, particularly in Schwalbe’s discussion of his friend David Baer. Is there a book that has provided comfort for you in a particularly dark time?
10. Discuss the concept of "vertical thinking" versus "lateral thinking." How would you identify yourself? How do books, and the act of reading, innately provide the reader with the opportunity to become more lateral thinkers?
11. In Anne Morrow Lindberg’s Gift from the Sea, she emphasizes the importance of spending time alone, particularly for women. Do you share this point of view? How does modern-day living and our constant interaction with technology inhibit us from solitude? When was the last time you conscientiously "disconnected" and spent time by yourself?
12. On page 122, Schwalbe quotes the cookbook author Nigella Lawson, who asserts that "food marks a connection between the living." Explore this statement. How does cooking and sharing meals together shape our humanity? How did Edna Lewis’s work emphasize the connection between cooking and community?
13. In the discussion of Bartleby, the Scrivener, Schwalbe discusses the "radical" nature of the character, asserting that his radicalness is not the result of the fact "that he refuses to do what’s asked of him; it’s that he refuses to give a reason." Consider all the times in which you have quit a pursuit. What feelings have you associated with that experience? Were you able to adhere to the principle of "passive resistance," or did you find yourself feeling obligated, or even guilty, because of the act of quitting?
14. In "Mastering the Art of Reading," Schwalbe describes reading as a "communion" with the book, achieving perfect harmony when you forget the self and are completely immersed in the book’s pages. How did Zen in the Art of Archery reveal surprising truths about the meditative act of reading for Schwalbe?
15. Which of the books featured in Books for Living have you read, if any? If you have, did you experience any connections to the text that were similar to the author’s? How did reading this book help re-contextualize them for you? Are there any you want to revisit with fresh eyes? If you haven’t encountered any of these titles, which are you inspired to read?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
John Pipkin, 2016
Boomsbury USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781632861870
Summary
A transporting new historical novel from the acclaimed author of Woodsburner.
In late-eighteenth-century Ireland, accidental stargazer Caroline Ainsworth learns that her life is not what it seems when her father, Arthur, throws himself from his rooftop observatory.
Caroline had often assisted her father with his observations, in pursuit of an unknown planet; when astronomer William Herschel discovered Uranus, Caroline could only watch helplessly as unremitting jealousy drove Arthur to madness.
Now, gone blind from staring at the sun, he has chosen death over a darkened life.
Grief-stricken, Caroline abandons the vain search, leaves Ireland for London, and tries to forget her love for Finnegan O’Siodha, the tinkering blacksmith who was helping her father build a telescope larger than his rival's.
But her father has left her more than the wreck of that unfinished instrument: his cryptic atlas holds the secret to finding a new world at the edge of the sky. As Caroline reluctantly resumes her father's work and confronts her own longings, Ireland is swept into rebellion, and Caroline and Finnegan are plunged into its violence.
This is a novel of the obsessions of the age: scientific inquiry, geographic discovery, political reformation, but above all, astronomy, the mapping of the solar system and beyond. It is a novel of the quest for knowledge and for human connection—rich, far-reaching, and unforgettable. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Washington & Lee University; M.A., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill;
Ph.D., Rice University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas
John George Pipkin is an American author of historical novels, who holds a PhD in British Romantic Literature from Rice University in Houston, Texas, an MA in English from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a BA from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. His first novel, Woodsburner, published in 2009, won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Massachusetts Center for the Book Fiction Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award.
Woodsburner revolves around a little-known event in the life of Henry David Thoreau: in 1844, Thoreau accidentally set fire to 300 acres of woods around Concord, Massachusetts, and Pipkin imagines the impact of that fire upon Thoreau, as well as three other characters.
The Blind Astronomer's Daughter, published in2016, concerns astronomical discoveries in the 18th century and, in particular, a fictional astronomer who commits suicide and his daughter who struggles to resume her father's work in scientific discovery.
In 2010, Pipkin was named writer-in-residence at Southwestern University, and was awarded the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. He teaches writing at Southwestern University, at the University of Texas at Austin, and in Spalding University's Low-Residency MFA Program.
Pipkin has been awarded a 2016 MacDowell Colony (New Hampshire) Residential Fellowship for ongoing work on his third novel. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/19/2017.)
Book Reviews
The novel's far-flung peregrinations give it a certain shapelessness, but its power lies in its vibrant and arresting imagery, resonant themes and sense of intellectual ferment. In his extraordinary ability to convey his characters' emotions as they take in the universe's immensity, Pipkin captures our own awe and sense of puniness as we look at the skies and the "implacable cartwheeling of worlds slow and indifferent.
Katherine A. Powers - New York Times Book Review
The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter is a tour de force of characterization and historical narrative . . . No matter how small, the characters and the time come alive in narrative that is rich, intense and meticulously rendered that it often comes across as lyrical or philosophical"
Historical Novel Review
[E]xquisitely crafted...a sensitive recounting of Ireland's travails..., a riveting description of the passion of discovery in the late 18th century, and a brilliant examination of such age-old themes as the longing for permanence and belonging. —Cynthia Johnson, formerly with Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA
Library Journal
[P]anoramic... [T]he second half, dominated by the bloody Irish uprising of 1798, never really gels with the first. Still, a fascinating look at the particular manias and obsessions of those who study the stars amid turmoil on Earth.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Compare and contrast the experiences of Caroline Herschel and Siobhan Ainsworth. Both women are considered outcasts due to their gender and physical disabilities. How do they each overcome their disadvantages? Explore the many similarities in their stories and how their common experiences shape them as women and as scientists. In what ways does Caroline Herschel serve as a foil for Siobhan?
2. Pipkin delves into the struggle and invisibility of women in science by examining the true story of Caroline Herschel and the fictional accounts of Siobhan Ainsworth and the Seven Sisters. How were each of these women erased and/or celebrated by their male counterparts? Discuss the irony of the Seven Sisters’ world-renowned mirror business and what it exposes about the industry of science. In your opinion, has society’s attitude toward female scientists changed or continued to be exclusionary?
3. Each section of the novel is named for a stage of planetary orbit. When cautioning Arthur, McPherson notes that “The past is a mirror to the future” (78). Explore how the cyclical movement of a planet in orbit can be found metaphorically throughout the novel. How do Finn and Siobhan seem to orbit each other? Are there other characters who fall into orbit with one another? How do locations such as New Park serve as the focal point of multiple orbits? Provide an example of how a section title serves to foreshadow or describe the chapter’s events.
4. In order to pass his time in Dublin, Finn begins to serve the helpless by fashioning aids for their ailments. His prized possession is the elaborate brace he devises to revive Siobhan’s weak hand. At first, Siobhan would have nothing to do with Finn’s invention because it brought back traumatic memories of being experimented upon in childhood. Refusing to wear it, she resolves that “she would not have [Finn] regard her as a damaged clockwork ... she would fit herself to no man’s design” (359). And yet, the brace improves her movement so well that it becomes a prized possession. In your opinion, is Finn’s compulsion to fix Siobhan a harmful or generous quality? Can it be both?
5. Discuss the novel’s treatment of order and randomness. Herschel thinks, “There is no randomness to it, just as there is nothing random in the slow turn of night and day. To the well-prepared mind, he tells them, the world presents no accidents, only patterns yet to be recognized” (60). Lord Camden is lauded for his commitment to governmental order, Mr. McPherson is fiercely defensive of the order of power, and Caroline and Siobhan are both taught to take precise and orderly calculations of the stars’ movement. But randomness prevails as well: Finn’s random letters miraculously reach Siobhan, and astronomers still rely on a serendipitous moment of discovery. In your opinion, does the novel argue that the universe is guided by order or randomness? Are there moments in the novel where randomness is embraced, and when?
6. Discuss William Herschel’s theory: “... every object of mass throughout the universe not only draws other bodies to itself, but repels what it attracts. This repulsive power is just as necessary for the survival of matter as is the force of attraction. Without the latter . . . we would not be, and without the former, we would not be as we are” (223). Throughout the novel, Finn and Siobhan manage to both attract and repel each other—each at times pulling the other close and then being swept away. How does this adversity impact them? Are they ever discouraged? Why or why not? Explain the meaning of Herschel’s last line. How are repulsive powers necessary for survival? How do the forces that attract you make you who you are?
7. Two of the novel’s greatest struggles are rooted in the concept of ownership. Arthur Ainsworth drives himself mad with jealousy and defeat when he cannot find the planet he has already named as his own. Ireland is plunged into warfare over the dispute between who rightfully owns its soil. Owen hears the mantra: “Let these English landlords stare at the heavens all they want, for they will no longer possess the land beneath our feet” (160). What are the parallels between these disparate types of ownership? How does the desire to claim ownership cause conflict throughout the book? Are there characters who seek to own nothing? If so, who?
8. Explore the significance of maps and atlases throughout the novel. James is convinced that “ ... no man would ever trust a map drawn by one who has never set his foot where he has cast his eye” (429). Compare James’s quote with the ideology of Arthur’s father: “Men who watch the sky ... do so only to convince us that things are not as they appear” (24). Arthur’s blind sketches appear manic, but together they become the atlas that leads Siobhan to the furthest edge of the known universe. James’s drawings, though thinly informed, convince Siobhan to select him as a travel companion. Are maps purely objective, or can they be informed by one’s experience? Do maps of the sky ruin its beauty or enhance it?
9. Arthur, Siobhan, and Caroline all believe they can see the ghosts of their loved ones reflected in the sky. Explore the significance of these apparitions. Who appears to each character, and why? What do these ghosts help illuminate about each astronomer’s motive for searching the skies? In your opinion, what is similar about a ghost and a star?
10. Finn is a natural fixer. He is fascinated by “how each part turn[s] in concert with the others, large and small, no piece indispensable, nothing useful on its own” (234). Forced to flee from New Park with his ailing parents, Finn is finally given the opportunity to master the art of mending and open up his sidewalk business in Edinburgh as the “FIXER OF SMALLOBJEX.” How does Finn’s interest in minutia mirror or compliment Siobhan’s interest in astronomy? Unexpectedly, his talents lead him to an interest in the controversial science of galvanic energy. To an outsider, it seems as if he can resurrect the dead. How does Finn use this power to his advantage and how to does it change the course of his life?
11. Driven insane by the desire to see as far into the depths of the universe as possible, Arthur Ainsworth blinds himself by aiming his powerful telescope at the sun. While Siobhan is horrified, Arthur is strangely at peace. He muses, “They would not understand if he told them that with his eyes extinguished he sees more now than they can imagine ... the ghosts and phantoms of things still to be discovered and understood and mapped” (7). Considering Arthur’s arduous career as an astronomer, discuss his motives for blinding himself. Is it purely jealousy? What kinds of things does Arthur believe he can see better now without the distraction of sight? If Arthur feels more content in darkness, why would he kill himself?
12. “Sometimes he feels certain that if men could but be made to hold still and think at length on the vast incomprehensibility of creation, wars would cease altogether” (60). Discuss the significance of this quote throughout the novel. Why would reckoning with the universe bring about peace? Conversely, what statement is Herschel making about the cause of war? Discuss the relationship between this quote and the Irish rebellion. How could the philosophy of astronomy quell the distress of Ireland’s disenfranchised?
13. Time is precious for astronomers. William Herschel is furious whenever he feels that his time has been wasted. To him, “Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft” (61). Arthur and Siobhan battle time as well: he seeks to “secure fame’s immortality” (5) in order to outlast his short life, and by the time Siobhan reaches Rome, she is convinced that a minor miscalculation has caused her to mistake the new planet’s orbit, making it unviewable until 1972. How does each astronomer balance the urgency of his or her discoveries with the incomprehensibly vast lifetime of the galaxy? How does their unique relationship to time set them apart from ordinary citizens?
14. When Finn is swept up by the Irish resistance, Siobhan is entirely certain that he will return and together they will find the planet her father had hunted for so long. She thinks, “... there had never been any chance that they might have done otherwise, for no single body—no matter the force of will—can resist the pull of the universe” (364). But although Finn has the opportunity, he never returns from the battlefield. When deciding whether to go into the deadly battle of New Ross, he “tells himself that he will not. And then he does” (344). In your opinion, what overrides Finn’s desire to return to Siobhan? How does his decision complicate Siobhan’s understanding of their destiny and the strength of a greater power? Discuss how Finn’s presumed death challenges the novel’s commitment to order and orbit.
15. Though James and Siobhan consider each other to be unlikely companions, they are more similar than they might believe. At the end of the novel, they find themselves in Italy, having traveled hundreds of miles from their comfortable lives in pursuit of disparate dreams: Siobhan hopes to finally glimpse the planet her father fervently sought, and James is finally fulfilling his goal of escaping Ireland. In what ways are they similar or different? In what ways are their personalities complimentary? Do you consider them to be an unlikely pair? Discuss how Caroline Herschel has influenced both of their journeys.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)